I ran into this via an article on the UX Magazine site.

It’s funny, but real.

http://www.guardedlyoptimistic.com/2007/10/if-taglines-were-honest.html

This brilliantly illustrates a point that designers and agencies have been trying to make to clients for years.

Watch the video and spread the word by embedding the video or linking to the site — http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

Who knows? Maybe the next client you get will have watched it and you won’t have to work as hard to make your point. Fingers crossed.

The online buzz over “going dark” began in earnest last January after Mark Ontkush, a self-described “green computing evangelist,” wrote a blog post concerning environmentally friendly Web design. Ontkush claimed that if a popular site such as Google switched its home page background color from white to black, it could save hundreds of megawatt hours a year.

I read this article over at BusinessWeek.com some months ago and thought to myself that it really was bordering on the ridiculous. No matter how energy conscious one gets, there are so many other ways to save electricity than to force-fit your design in to a dark palette.

I can’t even see myself using this as an excuse to justify a colour scheme because it’d sound ridiculous.

I really enjoyed reading this post over at Boxes and Arrows, because I’ve long held the belief that users aren’t resentful of scrolling. I haven’t really looked for any data to back up the assertion, so it wasn’t something I’d pick a fight about, but instinct said that the web had evolved enough in this regard to not be tied to its print brethren any longer.

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

We are all well aware that web design is not an easy task. There are many variables to consider, some of them technical, some of them human. The technical considerations of designing for the web can (and do) change quite regularly, but the human variables change at a slower rate. Sometimes the human variables change at such a slow rate that we have a hard time believing that it happens.

This is happening right now in web design. There is an astonishing amount of disbelief that the users of web pages have learned to scroll and that they do so regularly. Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users.

Tara over at graphic design blog started a Design Bloopers Competition contest a few weeks ago.

Below is what I decided to enter, against my better judgement. What would ‘better judgement’ be? Bury the incident and pretend it never happened!

About six months ago, while I was still in the employ of an agency and attended office daily, I got a call from my wife. She said that the partnership she was entering into with a local fashion designer had come through and she now needed a logo — by the evening, if possible!

I was in the middle of a ton of stuff, but figured that if I pushed this task, I’d get hell when I get home. So I thought about it for 10 minutes, had a sort-of-obvious idea, found a roundish font (Bauhaus) and went to work. My wife’s name is Batul and the fashion designer is named Umar. He’s more prominent, so I knew his name was going to come first. The symbol was going to be UB in lowercase letters — ub — followed by their respective first names.

15 more minutes editing the letter shapes and I was done with a B&W version. I sent her an SMS telling her it was done and to check her mail. She checked and messaged back — “Looks great. Thanks” . I got home and she told me she wanted it to be blue and green. This is what it ended up looking like.

The next day, she got someone in her office to create the bags, labels, tags, etc and the art was sent for printing.

That was that.

About a week later, I was at work where a visualiser and copywriter were working independently of the rest of the department to come up with some concepts and layouts. I walked in the conference room to check on them and saw a full page ad printed in the Dubai newspaper, Khaleej Times.

I stopped in my tracks. I looked at the paper a little closer. I crapped my pants. I then caught my breath and moved on to find out how they were progressing with their task.

This is what I saw.

Tara announced the results a week ago, and it turns out that no one produced, or admitted to producing, a gaffe as superb as mine!